It's the HHS reaffirming what the law says as written. way too many companies got loosey goosey with this stuff. The mental gymnastics we'd hear from healthcare companies "oh our legal team said it's okay to have Facebook installed here because [convoluted and totally not kosher reasoning]" was crazy when you'd review the law as written.
Startups, hospital systems, payers...doesn't matter how much resources or the company's particular compliance stance. You'd be amazed where these companies are sending data to Google and Facebook data without consent and without BAAs in place. HHS here is specifically going after larger health networks and hospital systems (typically way more compliance focused than your average healthtech startup).
39 investors total (this is highlighted in the post I linked btw, with a bunch of other analysis you'll likely find interested). When we started, we planned to raise between $1m and $2m.
I'm commenting on investor emotions, not whatever the fed is gonna do or the value of the dollar in the future.
I'm not saying that waiting a few months will make it better like it did in 2020. My experience is that most investors don't know how to act in a rapidly changing environment. Nobody wants to look like an idiot holding a bag just a few weeks after doing a deal with a sky high valuation on a company that's hype-y and doesn't have strong fundamentals. What investors end up doing is just pausing investing to get a feel for where the market is going to end up. As a founder you don't want to pitch VCs during that "pause" period. VCs still talk to founders during this pause period, they just have little to no intention of actually deploying dollars in anything that's not completely obvious (whether they realize it or not). You see it in this thread with a few comments from VCs around deals above seed stage definitely feeling "stalled". That's exactly what I'm talking about. Founders just end up burning thru a bunch of investor leads that are no's today but could likely be yeses in 3 months time. I think we're in that pause period right now. And if a company is able to, it's probably best to wait 90 days for VCs to adjust.
So what if it gets worse? In that care investors are settled in and know the game. They'll be deploying capital, just with more scrutiny and lower valuations. Capital will still be out there – there's tons of funds and plenty of money available for seed stage. That's a better situation than the "pause" period I describe above, where founders go out pitching and investors kick tires but don't deploy capital.
Also my opinion is that the summer is the worst time to raise, regardless of macro market conditions and even in great times. Once school gets out, people start traveling, etc...the reality is that the old trope of VCs don't work over the summer is probably unfair to some in the industry, but not undeserved :)
I raised a seed round in March 2020. The market later in 2020 + 2021 went kinda haywire, but between March and July 2020 it was pretty rough out there. We started fundraising a week before the country went into lockdown from COVID-19.
1. Wait if you can. Even just a few months. VCs tend to freeze up in the face of macro uncertainty. This happened in Q2 2020 when COVID was very new – nobody knew what was going to happen, so investors just paused for a few months. Then things really took off. I think we're in that "I'm not sure how things are going to shake out so I'm just gonna pause/slow down for now" period right now. Investors will get used to the conditions – regardless of what they are – after a few months. The summer is also a terrible time to raise money, so I'd suggest you wait till the fall regardless if you can. If you gotta go out now, read on...
2. If you can't land a bigger check because those VCs have cold feet (they often freeze up during market uncertainty), then you gotta raise from small checks.
3. Small checks is a numbers game, just like B2B sales. We pitched 160 investors to raise $1.5m
4. Seek momentum wherever you can. Getting forward progress from a handful of $10-25k angels is really important for your mental state, and that will flow into every new investor pitch. And it often becomes easier to raise with the more momentum your round has.
5. Be super realistic about your valuation expectations. It's not a thing worth losing a good investor over by over-optimizing on valuation. You're better off taking a little bit more dilution now and staying alive than never getting going.
6. Ignore the advice of anyone who hasn't raised in bad conditions or isn't an investor. Everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about. Even then, don't run your business off of what one person on the internet says. I feel qualified to give advice here because I raised $1.5m in March 2020, and just raised a Series A 3 weeks ago. Just don't run your business based on what I (alone) say.
We did YC as well. Think about applying if you haven't!
hey! Co-founder of Freshpaint here. Yes, we're YC-backed along with Segment, so you're probably thinking of us. YC does often fund startups working on similar things.
FYI you can customize it, and force it to always display certain controls.
I had the exact same frustrations as you. Took me 10 mins digging into settings to figure it out. Now I have my touchbar constantly displaying all of the controls that are buttons on the Air (ie a completely over-engineered solution to get the same result)
It's a sizable revenue stream for the payment networks, credit bureaus, Tivo/Roku, and others you wouldn't even think of. When a cashier asks you for your zip code or phone number in the store, that's two ways used to tie the purchase back to your identity.
I did enjoy my time at Quantcast. The dataset is used for more than targeting advertising. For example, Quantcast's offers a free analytics product that uses the same dataset.
I am conflicted, and my view on data collection more broadly is more nuanced than what's in this comment. For this kind of data collection specifically: On one hand, it's how the entire publishing industry has built their revenue model. And I like news, sports, content, etc. On the other hand, it's creepy for a 3rd-party service that I've never heard of or interacted with being able to infer traits about me based on my browsing patterns, and then sell targeted advertising to yet another company I've never interacted with. I use an adblocker specifically for this reason, despite running an analytics startup.
SAFEs make it easy these days to add someone to the round (for any amount). The issue becomes time management (is it really worth hours of calls, responding to questions over email, etc) trying to close such a small check.
There's a secondary issue of wrangling each investor in subsequent rounds or an acquisition (which that can just gets kicked down the road). Some investors provide value beyond their money, mostly with their connections to other investors, connections to potential customers, and skills in certain areas, or just generally someone you can call for advice.
One thing I've learned having gone thru this process: it's common for angel investors to write small checks, though not common knowledge. I always thought you needed to write a $25-50k check to be able to invest in a startup. It's common for people in the industry to invest smaller amounts like $5k-$10k, sometimes even less than $5k. I've even now started doing it myself.
When a user visits your site, we give them a cookie with a unique user ID. We determine the number of users you have based on the number of distinct user IDs we've seen.
We're definitely conscious of user-based pricing, and we'll try to work with you to come up with a price that allows you to use Freshpaint across your entire site. We've done this with others that have funky business models where traffic is high in some spots. Otherwise, you can install Freshpaint just on the private component of your site and collect data where it's the most valuable.
For customers that need it, we get necessary legal documents/procedures in place (DPA, etc) to be compliant with local regulations. We also share with customers our documentation that communicates our security measures and how we process customer data. You are correct - this stuff is not accessible on the marketing site, we'll get there :)
In terms of your integrations comment: beyond the integrations we have now, we prioritize new ones based on customer demand. So, yes, if the market trends in the direction you mentioned then we will as well. My personal take is that open source alternatives are currently a small subset and it's unclear to me where the future lies. I also think privacy and security get conflated here sometimes.
It's the HHS reaffirming what the law says as written. way too many companies got loosey goosey with this stuff. The mental gymnastics we'd hear from healthcare companies "oh our legal team said it's okay to have Facebook installed here because [convoluted and totally not kosher reasoning]" was crazy when you'd review the law as written.
Startups, hospital systems, payers...doesn't matter how much resources or the company's particular compliance stance. You'd be amazed where these companies are sending data to Google and Facebook data without consent and without BAAs in place. HHS here is specifically going after larger health networks and hospital systems (typically way more compliance focused than your average healthtech startup).